On Monday, Tom B on the Forest Education Initiative facebook page asked for a bit of help with his growing stick and twig collection:
Help! since becoming a FS practitioner two years ago I’ve been suffering from some weird disorder. It’s very inconvenient and I’m running out of room to accommodate it. Every time I walk past fallen trees, cut branches or pruned bushes I can’t help but take some wood! Now I have a shed full of logs, sticks and twigs! Can anyone help by suggesting something a bit different that I can turn this pile of wood into?
Well this post is for you Tom. As you also said that spoons were not on the menu, I thought I would share my latest whittling obsession inspired by this great little book by Chris Lubkeman
It has really clear instructions on how to make several different birds from crooks or forks and I am not going to duplicate them here but if you like what you see then click on the image and you can buy the book pretty cheaply on Amazon.
I’ve talked to a few people who have bought the book but not tried out any of the projects. They are really pretty straightforward and a good way of developing good techniques in holding your piece of work and using different knife grips and cuts. The author shows some really tiny versions of his sculpture in the book so my next challenge is to make some micro chickens. Here are a few of yesterdays creations enjoying the sun in the garden. The knife is there for scale.
I also had a go at a generic bird though someone else will have to tell me if it resembles any particular species – I suspect not!
Happy whittling all!
Like the roosters! Might give them a try – just had another look at the book.
In Chris Lubkerman’s other book ‘The Little Book of Whittling’ he does knives and forks and we do loads of those with kids as they like the idea of something they can ‘use’. I also like the fact that he only uses a swiss army knife which is much more ‘acceptable’. We have a set of around 20 SAK’s that I bough over time on ebay before they decided to ban knife sales. Vicky